Velcro Companies is a privately held company that produces a series of mechanical based fastening products, including fabric hook and loop fastners, under the brand name "Velcro".

Velcro is the brainchild of Georges de Mestral, a Swiss engineer who, in 1941 went for a walk in the woods and wondered if the burrs that clung to his trousers — and dog — could be turned into something useful. After nearly eight years of research (apparently it's not so easy to make a synthetic burr), de Mestral successfully reproduced the natural attachment with two strips of fabric, one with thousands of tiny hooks and another with thousands of tiny loops. He named his invention Velcro, a combination of the words "velvet" and "crochet," and formally patented it in 1955. Though the first Velcro was made out of cotton, de Mestral soon discovered that nylon worked best because it didn't wear with use. Early news reports (such as one that appeared in Time in 1958) described the product as a zipperless zipper — which, while accurate, sounds a little strange to us now. It seems there just weren't that many removable, re-useable all-surface fasteners back then.

 "Velcro is a series of hooks and loops, a male and female, one grabs the other and sticks."